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Reintroducing Joe Eszterhas

By Andrew Goldman February 2, 2012 4:26 pmFebruary 2, 2012 4:26 pm

Last we heard from Joe Eszterhas, he was advising teenagers to get fake ID’s so that they could sneak into an NC-17 movie that carried “a deeply religious message.” That movie, pray tell? “Showgirls.” Anyway, as you’ll read in this week’s Talk column, the screenwriter’s career took a few twists thereafter. He got cancer, left Hollywood and reconnected with God — the one who stars in the New Testament, not the Elizabeth Berkeley nudie flick. Now he’s working with Mel Gibson on a movie about Judah Maccabee. In some outtakes from this week’s interview, we explore further the multilayered paradoxes of Joe Eszterhas and Mel Gibson, two Catholics with baggage, doing a movie about heroic Jews.

Though both you and Mel Gibson might identify yourselves as Catholic, your beliefs are obviously much different. Where do you diverge?

Mel believes that Vatican II in the 60’s, and John Paul II specifically, ruined the church and that it’s now corrupt and irrelevant. John Paul is one of my heroes. He’s not one of Mel’s heroes.

One of the things that Vatican II did was to formally stop the Catholic rhetoric that the Jews of history should be held responsible for the death of Christ. The issue that many Jewish leaders had with “The Passion of the Christ” was that it depicted Caiaphas and this cabal of evil Jews plotting to kill Christ.

Look, I know and have the greatest respect for some of the Jewish leaders who were involved in the protest against the movie. I did a fund-raiser for the Anti-Defamation League when I was in L.A. But the charge that “The Passion of the Christ” is anti-Semitic is misguided. What I ask everyone to do with this movie we’re doing about the Maccabees is wait and judge it on what’s in it. The only thing I can tell you is that if I sense anything that’s anti-Semitic creeping into this project, I will remove myself from it and make known why I did. Mel did describe the movie recently as “a cowboy movie,” and that gives me a great deal of pause because I’m not writing a cowboy movie. I’m writing a kind of epic celebration of one of the greatest moments in Jewish history.

Considering the kind of debauched life of sex, drugs and adultery you once lived, it’s interesting that you now belong to a church that considers homosexual behavior a sin.

I condemn the church’s position homosexuality. I’m what you call an a la carte Catholic. The church’s position on homosexuality is awful and hypocritical, antimoral, especially when you consider that such a huge percentage of priests are gay. It’s just nuts, as is the church’s position on celibacy. There are reasons why the Catholic church is dying.
You feel similarly about the church’s stance on abortion?

No. I’m as militantly anti-abortion as I am militantly pro-gay marriage. It’s something that, frankly, was growing on me through the years, but it’s clarified in my head since I’ve gone back to the Church. One of the reasons is I remember being with a young woman in the course of my first marriage who already had five abortions and didn’t want me to use a condom. That’s just wrong.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…